AI agents interact with external services through two dominant paradigms today: CLIs which were originally built for humans, and structured tool protocols like MCP. Both impose significant overhead.

AXI is a new paradigm - agent-native CLI tools built from 10 design principles that treat token budget as a first-class constraint.

Evaluated across 490 runs (14 tasks × 7 conditions × 5 repeats) using Claude Sonnet 4.6:

Evaluated across 425 runs (17 tasks × 5 conditions × 5 repeats) using Claude Sonnet 4.6:

Reference AXI implementations:

• gh-axi — GitHub operations
• chrome-devtools-axi — Browser automation

See the full AXI Catalog below for all official and community AXIs.

npm install -g gh-axi
npm install -g chrome-devtools-axi

Add to your CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md:

Use `gh-axi` for GitHub and `chrome-devtools-axi` for browser automation.

These principles define what makes a CLI tool "an AXI":

Reference implementations maintained by the AXI project, validating the principles across different domains:

AXIs built and maintained by the community:

Built an AXI? Open a PR to add it to this list.

Install the AXI skill to get the design guidelines and scaffolding for building an AXI-compliant CLI:

npx skills add kunchenguid/axi

This installs the AXI skill - a detailed guide with examples for each principle that your coding agent can reference while building. For your own AXI, expose an explicit setup command for session hooks as the primary integration, then ship an installable Agent Skill as a lower-overhead secondary path. Users only need one path, but hooks and skills complement each other when both are available.

The browser benchmark harness lives in bench-browser/. It compares browser automation tools across 16 browsing tasks.

pnpm install

# Run a single condition × task
pnpm --dir bench-browser run bench -- run --condition chrome-devtools-axi --task read_static_page

# Run the full matrix
pnpm --dir bench-browser run bench -- matrix --repeat 5

# Generate summary report
pnpm --dir bench-browser run bench -- report

# Render the social video
pnpm --dir bench-browser run render:social

The HyperFrames composition for the social asset lives in bench-browser/social/. Edit social/index.html for the animation and render docs/social/rendered/race.mp4 with pnpm --dir bench-browser run render:social.

Published results (490 runs): bench-browser/published-results/report.md

The GitHub benchmark harness lives in bench-github/. It runs agent tasks across different interface conditions and grades results with an LLM judge.

pnpm install

# Run a single condition × task
pnpm --dir bench-github run bench -- run --condition axi --task merged_pr_ci_audit --repeat 5 --agent claude

# Run the full matrix
pnpm --dir bench-github run bench -- matrix --repeat 5 --agent claude

# Generate summary report
pnpm --dir bench-github run bench -- report

Published results (425 runs): bench-github/published-results/STUDY.md

• Website
• AXI Skill definition
• Browser benchmark study
• GitHub benchmark study